THE FIRST ANIMAL ILLUSTRATION OF HUMANITY WAS...A WILD PIG!

October 8, 2014. Pig lovers annotate this date! What a big surprise when I found that the cover of Nature this week was occupied by the the oldest cave art discovered to date; a wall painting showing the figure of a pig! The reported Indonesian images had been already discovered in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in the 1950s, but they were assumed to be no older than 10.000 years. New datings have pushed back the date to at least 40,000 years. This is the minimum age of the painting, considering the K/Ar dating technique has been applied to crust of calcium carbonate which precipitated over the painting after it was made. Near to what it seems to be a babirusa there is also a human hand painted in negative. The negative drawing is a common technique painting and is common,among other techniques, in other pictorial representations of well-known European caves. The importance of this particular rock painting is its age and its location; it precedes in thousands of years the oldest paintings found in Europe and it has been found thousands of kilometers away, at the time when some of the first modern humans arrived to Southeastern Asia.

a, b, Photograph (a) and tracing (b) showing the locations of the dated coralloid speleothems and associated paintings: a hand stencil and a large naturalistic depiction of an animal shown in profile. Although the animal figure is badly deteriorated and obscured by coralloids, we interpret it as a female babirusa. A painted red line below the babirusa (not clearly visible in a, but illustrated in b) seems to represent the ground surface on which the animal is standing or walking. The rock art panel is located on the ceiling about 8 m from the cave entrance and 4 m above the current cave floor. c, d, Profiles of the coralloid speleothems showing the microexcavated subsamples bracketing the age of the paintings. We interpret the similar ages for the overlying aliquots as a result of fast-growing speleothems. Figure and text from Aubert et al. (2014),

But to my surprise, the animal represented just near the human hand is not a deer,a bison or a horse, typical from famous sites at Europe, but a wild pig! The authors have interpreted the potatoe-like rounded-body shape, with very short legs, a kinky tail and a long crania of the drawing, to belong to a babirusa. We have already talked in another post about this wierd animal, Babyrousa babyrussa, for sure the strangest among all the Suidae, the family of the actual domestic pig. This wild pig is in risk of extinction and it is only found on four Indonesian islands, the bigger of all being Sulawesi, where the painting was found. The babirusa may have been an important animal for the island human populations, probably as a source of food. Strangely, it appears that the painter represented a female, which lacks the characteristic rounded tusks of males. Other interesting fact is that it seems that the animal illustrated had hair, as it can be inferred from the image above. However, actual babirusas don't have hair. This means that either they have lost hair in 40.000 of evolution, which would be rare a priori, or yet that there was another population of pig-like creatures in the island, maybe another babirusa species, which eventually got extinct. 

Anyway, the discovery is even more striking if we think about the rare examples of pigs in cave art illustrations. The hunting scene of the Cave of "El Charco del Agua Amarga", in Spain, is among the best preserved of these examples.

Is it a coincidence that the first animal pictorial representation of humanity was a pig?

The information of this post was gathered from the original paper (Aubert et al., 2014) and from Nature news.

Aubert, M. et al. Nature 514, 223–227 (2014)